Biutiful isn’t a film to be seen on Christmas Day (as I did with my family). Its harsh and dry vision of life hits our sleeping minds, dazed by comfort and consumerism. This is a quality of Iñarritu’s films: Amores perros, 21 gramos, Babel, where nearly always very different lives bump into each other in many changing locations or languages and extreme situations. But his habitual scriptwriter just left him two years ago to make his own movies and something has changed in this new film by the Mexican director.
Tired of travelling around the world to shoot very complex plots full of flashbacks and flash forwards, this time he preferred to concentrate on one single character (called Uxbal and performed by a huge, Goya-awards winner, Javier Bardem) and to tell the lineal story of his final fall as a selfless father, involved in shady business to survive, in one single city: Barcelona. However, it isn’t set anywhere in Barcelona, but in Santa Coloma and the nearby Badalona. This depressed area is a melting pot for immigrant people from África, Asia and East Europe, who get mixed up with inner migrant workers from Andalucia and Extremadura (called “charnegos” by the native catalan people). They all are subjected to exploitation and poverty within an underground economy. So in the end, many lives (and deaths too) are joined by the Fate around Uxbal’s race against the time.
As you can guess, this is a “classic tragedy of the modern times” (author dixit), an immersion in another reality that we normally don’t look at; it’s very near to us in our cities, though. A dirty and unpleasant world which invites us to keep out of, although a poetic touch in the images and the music persuade us to think there could still be love and beauty (a wrong beauty: “Biutiful”) among so many personal disasters. Beyond doubt, this film is a necessary show aimed to put our delicate feet back on the ground. Anyway, this sort of thoughts is what doesn’t allow us to be totally happy.
Tired of travelling around the world to shoot very complex plots full of flashbacks and flash forwards, this time he preferred to concentrate on one single character (called Uxbal and performed by a huge, Goya-awards winner, Javier Bardem) and to tell the lineal story of his final fall as a selfless father, involved in shady business to survive, in one single city: Barcelona. However, it isn’t set anywhere in Barcelona, but in Santa Coloma and the nearby Badalona. This depressed area is a melting pot for immigrant people from África, Asia and East Europe, who get mixed up with inner migrant workers from Andalucia and Extremadura (called “charnegos” by the native catalan people). They all are subjected to exploitation and poverty within an underground economy. So in the end, many lives (and deaths too) are joined by the Fate around Uxbal’s race against the time.
As you can guess, this is a “classic tragedy of the modern times” (author dixit), an immersion in another reality that we normally don’t look at; it’s very near to us in our cities, though. A dirty and unpleasant world which invites us to keep out of, although a poetic touch in the images and the music persuade us to think there could still be love and beauty (a wrong beauty: “Biutiful”) among so many personal disasters. Beyond doubt, this film is a necessary show aimed to put our delicate feet back on the ground. Anyway, this sort of thoughts is what doesn’t allow us to be totally happy.
Guillermo de Juan (I2)